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For the past few weeks we have been working on a new Application that will make integrating you JomSocial community with the 3 Big Social networks viz. Facebook, Linked In & twitter much easier. A Big complaint from a lot of our customers is that very few users ever update their JomSocial Status. They prefer to udpate the status over at Twitter, Facebook or Linked In. When one of our customers came in looking for such a solution & another quickly followed, we decided to develop a product out of it..

On taking end user feedback, we found that users hate to go to so many sites to update their status. They love the way facebook & twitter can integrate with each other - That is when you update twitter updates automatically.. What would be best from their perspective is to be able to Update their JomSocial status such that all the other networks get updated as well. If they could do that , they would spend more time on a JomSocial network. What would be even better is if the status from the other networks was synced with JomSocial as well...

After a few weeks of work, we have JomSocial Broadcast for you.. It does the first job.. that of connecting to the networks via OAuth & posting to all of them very well.. While the reverse sync process is still experimental. We take this opportunity to bring it before you & take your feedback before doing a public release.

Broadcast for JomSocial

What is it ?

Broadcast for JomSocial shall be a JomSocial Application / Module that will let any JomSocial user connect his Twitter, Facebook & Linked In ( more networks are planned later) Status updates from your JomSocial site itself right from the status update box.

It supports 2 kind of Updates

A. From JomSocial to Twitter/ Facebook/ Linked In - This section is stable now & already being used on a few customer sites. 
B. From Twitter/ Facebook/ Linked In to JomSocial - This works well but is to be treated as a experimental feature for now.

How does the user use it ?

Its super simple. All he has to do is log in to his JomSocial Account, click on the Broadcast icons for Facebook/ Twitter / LinkedIn & allow the site application ( via OAuth) to post to the Social Network. The site admin has to simply setup a Facebook & Twitter application ( Simple instructions included ) which as you know is a great traffic draw in itself !

Once all the networks he wants to link are linked up, he just has to update his status from the JomSocial status box & voila .. all connected networks are updated !

Sneak Peak Screenshot

Let us know what you think !

Whats planned in the Future

1. Support for more networks

2. Support for Activity Stream & selected activity Sync

3. Stabilizing the reverse sync.

The latest addition to labs is for one extension we have been working with since we started working on Joomla.. or rather Mambo as it was called then !

This extension promises to add a much needed enhancement for one of our favorite & much used extension SOBI2 .

We have always felt SOBI needed a good contact form plugin. But when we started building one, we went all the way & created a full lead management extension !

The plugin shows a contact form below the SOBI listing. The user visiting the listing can use this form to contact the owner of the listing. Once the form is submitted a database entry is made storing all the lead information & a email is sent to the listing owner telling him that a new lead has been added against his listing.

The owner of the listing needs to have some ‘Credits’ to view the details of the lead. Currently we are using the ‘Vodes’ extension to let the owner buy credits using Paypal.  

The admin can configure number of free leads that the owner can view before he needs to buy credits. He can also configure the number of credits needed to view a listing.

This extension is on the brink of release. Check out our Pre release Brochure for more details & Screen shots of the extension.

We have some great news for all you Joomla Social Network administrators & owners.. We have a great line up of some cool Social Extensions coming very very soon ! Here's a quick sneak at them :)

A. Suggested Events

Based on our Network Suggest system, we bring you another suggestions module which will suggest events based on your profile information. As in Network suggest, you can chose what fields you want to use for the matching. Now you will be able to make your Events in JomSocial even more viral ! This will be available for JomSocial first. We are not sure which extension we shall use for integration with CB.. but Eventlist is high on our list of choices..

B. Show Similar Profiles

Want to see profiles on the site similar to the one you are looking at now ? Then this is the extension for you ! When a user visits a profile, he shall be shown top X matching profiles in a module. This will be available for JomSocial as well as CB.

C. Suggest Friends to Friends

Another Facebook feature to come to JomSocial sites, this extension will allow you to suggest friends to your current friends. This will work in a similar way to Facebook.

There's much more in our pipeline than this.. But its still some way from making it to the labs ! We are looking forward to more suggestions from you about these upcoming releases & as you know, your comments make a lot of influence on how they are built ! So comment away !

Its finally in the Labs ! With Social Ads for JomSocial, you can create Facebook like demographically targeted ads to show on Your JomSocial Site. This extension allows advertisers to create their advertisement , Target the users they want to show the advertisement to, Decide if they want to pay by impressions or per click, Pay online & get the advertisement started up right away !

This extension promises to revolutionize Social Networking in Joomla. Demographic advertising which has been in place on Facebook for some time now can be easily added to your own JomSocial based website. Though the first release will be for JomSocial, we shall be rolling out versions with CB & the soon to come Anahita Support as well !

The possibilities of this engine are amazing & future releases will come packed with even more features.

We hope the community appreciates this idea & comes forward with feedback to make the system even better. We shall be blogging about the development regularly & also open it up to select beta testers before the public release.

Read on for more information & some early previews of the system.